Murder of South African Women by Partners 5 Times Global Rate

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The killing of South African model Reeva Steenkamp by her
boyfriend, Paralympic athlete Oscar Pistorius, brought
international attention to a country known for troubling rates of
violence, particularly against women. Now, new research finds the
country's rate of homicide of women by intimate partners is five
times the global rate.

Pistorius is being tried for the murder of Steenkamp, whom he
says he mistook for an intruder in their home the night he shot
her through a bathroom door. Prosecutors say the killing was
premeditated.

The new study, published today (April 2) in the journal PLOS
Medicine, finds that while the overall homicide rate of women has
declined in South Africa, there has been no significant decrease
in
murders by intimate partners in a decade. Current and
ex-husbands and boyfriends — as well as same-sex partners and
rejected suitors — were considered "intimate partners" in the
study.

South Africa has a high murder rate, with 31.8 intentional
homicides per 100,000 people as of 2010, according to the United
Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. It can be difficult to compare
crime rates across international boundaries because of varying
legal definitions, but the United Nations lists the United
States' 2010 intentional-homicide rate at 4.2 per 100,000 people.
(The Federal Bureau of Investigation puts the murder and
non-negligent manslaughter rate for the United States at 4.8 per
100,000 people in 2010 and 4.7 per 100,000 people in 2011.)

There is no monitoring system for murders of women in South
Africa, so Abrahams and her colleagues used data from mortuaries
around the country to estimate rates in 1999. They then repeated
the study in 2009.

The decade between studies saw many changes in the South African
legal system, including the implementation of a
domestic-violence act passed in 1998, followed by a
strengthening of laws around sexual offenses in 2007, and the
2000 Firearms Control Act, which instituted gun-control measures
and was fully implemented by 2004.

"Our goal was to determine if there was a shift in the number of
women killed by their partners after 10 years," Abrahams said.

Overall homicide dropped 44 percent in South Africa between 2004
and 2010, and the new study found a parallel decline in femicide,
or the murder of women. In 1999, 24.7 women per 100,000 people
were murdered in South Africa. In 2009, that number dropped to
12.9 per 100,000.

But there was no statistically significant difference in the rate
of women being killed by their partners, which stood at 5.6 per
100,000 in 2009. That's more than double the rate of two women
per 100,000 seen in the United States.

Preventing femicide

Gun control appears to have had an effect on the femicide rate,
Abrahams said, with the proportion of gun-related homicides
decreasing from 33 percent in 1999 to 17 percent in 2009. But the
study suggests a need to do more, particularly in investigating
instances of domestic violence before a murder happens, the
researchers wrote. Most women killed by a partner in South Africa
had been in
long-term abusive relationships, Abrahams said.

"Gender inequities in relationships and male dominance remain
important contributors to the killings of an intimate partner,
and factors that contributed to the decrease of overall killings
may not be effective for those killings of an intimate nature,"
she said.